


The Daughter of Paradise

by BobRussellFan



Series: Where's Beverly? [3]
Category: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: a pretty sad one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:48:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22841254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BobRussellFan/pseuds/BobRussellFan
Summary: Naomi Wildman's story.
Series: Where's Beverly? [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1657300
Comments: 8
Kudos: 62





	The Daughter of Paradise

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS for Picard #5 below

You didn’t really understand your childhood until you got older. That happens to a lot of people. 

It never really occurs to you that the adults around you are spending time with you because there are only so many places you can go in a ship the height of a 20th century skyscraper and because you’re the only kid around - because you’re a symbol of home and family and all the things they’ve left behind. So when you’re back home you don’t really understand why the adults you knew don’t spend time with you like they used to; where did they go? 

School is hard for you when you get back. The idea that there are other children around is shocking and threatening. You get into fights, real ones, and luckily they’re able to regrow that boy’s cheek, but the memory of that day stays with you for a long time, and maybe that's why you're never really happy with school after that. When you’re old enough you skip the Academy and go straight for the enlisted program. It gets you off this planet that’s never really been your home. And out of the house where your mother lives - but not your father. 

It didn’t occur to you as a kid that your mom and the nice man who watched over you at night and tucked you into bed were in a relationship - and that most of the adults you knew must have known about it but never said anything because your mother and the man who took care of you wanted to keep things quiet for the sake of her marriage back in the Alpha Quadrant. They were discreet and they never so much as held hands when they were around you, but it comes out once you’re back home and she tells your father, and then he moves back to his antique shop on Bajor and she takes a teaching job on Earth and takes off the uniform. 

You hate her for a while after that, and your father too for not being able to take it (which in retrospect was irrational but you didn't need to be rational, dammit, that wasn't your job), but she was far from home and had every reason to think she’d be raising a precocious little girl (in more ways than one) all by herself for the rest of her life. She deserved a little happiness. You wonder about the nice man, though. The Delta Quadrant is so far away even now and you know that everyone’s assurances that you’d see him again someday were mostly just the stories you tell a little girl going through some big changes. You know for a fact there wasn’t enough time to tell him where you were going. Does he wonder where you went, you and the rest of your crew? 

Enlisted personnel don’t get the same kind of career flexibility that officers do but you work hard and you had top marks in your training so you actually get the assignment you want - one of two people on a communications array in the Alpha Quadrant near the Romulan border, with the comfort of duranium walls around you and the prying eyes of your peers to a minimum. You’re fourteen but you look nineteen by human standards, and thank the Great Bird your maturation is catching up with your mother’s species and not your father’s because this has _not_ made your adolescent years any easier. Synths and holograms are doing this kind of low-level work across much of the Federation but Admiral Janeway is an officer of the old school - she’s not interested in upgrades like that in her sector. 

Yes. Janeway. She was a god to you when you were a child, the stern-but-smiling authority figure that everyone deferred to, even your mother, the one whose decisions always saved the day when things got bad. There was a time when you would have defended her to your last breath - even that last great trick, that endrun around the laws of time and space that brought you safely home to Earth in time to grow up on a planet rather than on a ship. 

It’s not until you watch Mars burn, and then Romulus, that it occurs to you (with a nagging voice in the back of your head) that surely Admiral Janeway (the other one, slim and severe, ready to die rather than live with what she'd done) must have known about this. Did she love you so much she was willing to let all those people die? You suggest that to the Admiral, your admiral, and she admits frankly to you (as she never would to anyone else) that she wonders that herself. Then there’s the other unsettling possibility - that it was _you_, or your ship, something in your return that brought all this to the Alpha Quadrant with you. 

Either way - your god had the best of intentions and made no mistakes but she had feet of clay anyway - and billions of people died. You can never quite look at her the same way after that. You feel something close off inside you the day she takes early retirement from Starfleet. Another member of her generation running away. But by then you have other things to worry about - and you've already lost something worse than a mentor. 

When she calls you from the Romulan border, Seven never asks you to resign. You’re glad she doesn’t. 

It never occurs to you to quit, not then, not when everything you were taught to value in that single storm-tossed vessel on the other side of the Galaxy is falling apart. Starfleet has been your _life_ and if it’s doing the wrong thing now, well, somebody has to be in it to make things right. That’s what you think, and that’s what Icheb thinks. 

Icheb actually did go through the Academy and you love him like fire. Not like _that_ - your personal tastes don’t run that way, and anyway you wouldn’t want to date a boy who saw you when you were still playing with Flotter on the holodeck, but he’s handsome, he’s smart, he’s kind, he’s the big brother you never had. An island of stability; another child of that place that now seems impossibly far away. The dream of an Alpha Quadrant that never was, an Alpha Quadrant that’s falling apart in ways a war never allowed. 

You don’t really get a lot of leave as a crewman first class on her first assignment but Icheb does, and so you watch him go help Seven with a smile for him in that last holo. 

Seven never does tell you how he died (but she tells you who, oh yes, just in case everyone she loves is being targeted) but you’re smart and you have commcrew’s clearance, and you put the details together fast. When you think about it you want to scream, you want to cry, but you keep going because you have to try and fix it. You offer to quit and join Seven out there but she tells you Icheb wouldn’t have wanted that and you call her something your father called your mother when he was drunk. 

She’s not even angry with you. 

You put in your two years at rank and you take officer candidate school and you pass the test and you find yourself working for Starfleet Intelligence. And you are _good_ at your job, because you have learned how to be a good soldier, you knew how to do it when you were two years old, dammit, and you know this is for a higher purpose, and maybe you don’t have a voice yet but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to listen. 

You wind up on one of the Argus Arrays; a deep-space observation platform that can count a Klingon’s brow ridges from a sector away, and you watch, and you listen. And time passes and the fire dies, and you wear the uniform and you try not to think about stories of refugee ships being tractored back across the border, of a Federation that’s chosen itself over the rest of the galaxy, of a paradise that left others to their damnation. You wonder about the Delta Quadrant sometimes. 

Would Neelix be disappointed in you? He’d hardly even recognize you anymore. Your eyes turn yellow five years after Icheb died and you have to laugh at yourself in the mirror. Now you’re officially a mature woman! Ktarian women are supposed to start filing their horns at this point but hell with it, blood isn’t destiny, destiny is destiny, and you’ll look how you want. When your hair starts receding and your forehead bones start growing you get a red wig that you love and that makes you look as fierce as you feel sometimes. 

To your shame you weren’t actually looking when you spotted the name in an intelligence file, but you spotted it anyway because you _are_ smart, dammit, and when you get the name you know damn well Starfleet won’t do anything about it even though she tortured a Starfleet officer to death in cold blood, because an xB killed off-duty in neutral space isn’t even going to get a Nova-class ship anymore, dammit. 

So you send the message to the Fenris Rangers about who just replaced the Orion Syndicate girls at Freecloud and you watch the news feeds and keep your horned head down. You've known how to do that for a long time now. 

And when you get the news that Icheb’s murderer is dead, you lock the door to your quarters and you weep but you know it’s done, it’s done, and maybe you aren’t the woman you were promised to be when you were a girl but she was just a dream of a dream, a daughter of a fragment of paradise that was swept away by the cold and fiery reality of home. 

In the end, you are who you are, and who could expect more than that? 

You are Naomi Wildman.


End file.
